The Break

by Marian Keyes

  ‘If I get a dog, won’t it look like a sign to Ruthie that we really are over?’

  Matthew may as well treat himself to a pack of full-grown huskies – from the way Ruthie has thrown him to the media vultures: she obviously wants nothing to do with him ever again.

  Unless I’m wrong. Isn’t every relationship a mystery, which reveals itself only to the two people who are in it? ‘Think about it,’ I say lightly. ‘It would be heart-warming.’

  ‘Heart-warming? He’s the cleverest man in Britain!’ Dan sneers.

  Why was this asshat even here? ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ Attached by a long rattly chain outside a remote warehouse, tensed to bark at intruders?

  ‘You know what, I should. But taking care of my brother is more important.’

  ‘I can take care of him.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘What other ideas have you?’ Matthew asks. I’m guessing this happens a lot, him having to pour oil on waters that have been troubled by his brother.

  ‘Okay, hear me out.’ This is going to be a harder sell. ‘Have you heard of a show called Deadly Intentions?’

  It’s a late-night comedy on BBC2, a dark subversive thing, which features a character called Matthew Carlisle, who says stuff like ‘I’m Matthew Carlisle and under my suit I’m wearing Angela Merkel’s knickers.’

  Matthew says, ‘I’m Matthew Carlisle and when I come I shout out, “Bernie Sanders!” ’

  Right. So he knows the show. That, at least, saves me the very awkward task of explaining it to him.

  ‘You want him to go on that?’ Dan almost combusts. ‘It’s offensive!’

  ‘Just light-hearted silliness.’ More confident smiling from me. ‘But if Matthew could out-Matthew the Matthew character, people would love it. Showing you can laugh at yourself is very endearing.’

  ‘Okay,’ Matthew says. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Well, great!’ I hadn’t expected this to be so easy.

  ‘ “I’m Matthew Carlisle and I’m prepared to humiliate myself on national telly if it means clearing my name.” ’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha, good one, funny.’ Actually it was quite funny.

  ‘So what do I have to do?’

  ‘They start filming the new series in November.’

  ‘November?’ Dan pounces. ‘So when will it be on telly?’

  ‘Early next year. Remember what I said to you when we met last week? This is a long-term project, a slow, careful recalibration of how the public perceive Matthew.’

  ‘But what’s going on now, people thinking he’s a nanny-shagger, is killing him. We insist you do something today.’

  ‘Matthew,’ I say. ‘We can end this here. I’ll refund you for the unused hours and you can find another publicist.’

  ‘Oh.’ Matthew seems startled. ‘Are we that bad?’

  ‘This relationship needs to work for both of us.’ I’m pleasant but firm.

  ‘Oh. Well. Yes, but …’ Matthew turns to his brother. ‘I want to stay with her.’

  Dan closes his eyes. He looks a little sick. And I feel – because I’m only human – triumphant.

  ‘Dan is just looking out for me.’ Matthew is earnest. ‘We’ve only ever had each other.’

  ‘I sympathize.’ Which isn’t true. I neither sympathize nor not-sympathize, I just want to do my job. ‘But all this aggro isn’t helpful.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Matthew says. ‘We’ll be more cooperative.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I’m gracious in victory. Apart from the side-eyes I flash at Dan, but it happens so quickly, you’d barely notice. ‘A few more things. You should ally yourself with a charity, so think of one you’re passionate about. And you support Fulham, right? Start showing up at matches. Eat pies. Look approachable. Now, Twitter. I need access to your account to supplement your content.’

  ‘Videos of cats dancing.’ Once again Dan is sneery. But, to give him his due, he immediately mutters, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Puppies,’ I say. ‘Puppies dancing. Matthew is a dog person.’ I engage Matthew in intense eye contact. ‘I cannot emphasize this enough – no romance. Not a one-night stand. Nothing.’

  And, you know, there’s the tiniest flicker, a barely visible blink-and-flick, that I can’t decipher.

  ‘It’s vital,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  ‘We’re clear?’

  ‘Clear.’

  ‘One final thing, the Media Awards on Friday week – congratulations on being shortlisted. But no plus one allowed.’

  ‘Ruthie always came with me to these things.’

  ‘I know.’ I make consolatory noises. ‘But you can’t bring a female companion this time.’

  ‘Not even Mara Nordstrom? She’s a colleague.’

  ‘Matthew, no.’ Mara Nordstrom is one of the most lusted-after presenters on telly.

  ‘You’ve got to think how an ill-timed photo of you and Mara would look to the Great British Public. If you really want an ally, bring Dante.’

  Matthew throws him an aggrieved look, and Dan says, ‘Charming.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I say. ‘You’ll have lots of support.’

  ‘Oh. Oh-kay. That’s all right, then.’

  ‘Good.’ I gather my stuff.

  ‘I’ll see you out.’ Dan follows me down the hall and says, over my shoulder, ‘Nice move back there. Offering to jump ship. Now he really trusts you.’

  ‘Because he can!’ Out of Matthew’s earshot, I vent some frustration. ‘What is your problem with me?’

  ‘Just trying to take care of my big brother.’

  ‘He already told me that.’

  He looks appalled. I’m pretty appalled myself. This is unprofessional. ‘You know what?’ His face is furrowed with shock. ‘You’re like one of those snappy little dogs.’

  ‘Actually, you’re like one of those snappy little dogs!’ I step out into the street and feel the door slam shut behind me.

  ‘Nice kitchen, Dante,’ I say out loud. Then, much louder, ‘Not!’

  57

  Thursday, 27 October, day forty-five

  ‘Mum,’ Neeve says, when I get home from work on Thursday, ‘is your phone off?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Because Dad rang.’

  My heart jumps almost out of my mouth – Hugh rang?

  ‘About a charity ball,’ Neeve says.

  I’m frozen. I’m right on the edge where unbearable relief falls away into unbearable disappointment: Richie Aldin. Yeah, I’d seen his call come in and, no, I hadn’t answered it because I’ve already declined his wretched effing charity ball about a hundred billion times and his caper is bordering on harassment.

  ‘He said the three of us should go together!’

  Her happy, hopeful face strikes the fear of God into me and this is something that needs to be handled right now. ‘Neevey, I’m not going to the ball thing.’ My tone is gentle. ‘But let me talk to your dad about it.’

  I find his number and ring him. He answers too quickly. ‘Amy?’ All eager.

  ‘Can we meet for a chat?’

  ‘I can come to yours.’

  ‘Starbucks in Dundrum.’ I’m not prepared to travel any distance. ‘How soon can you get there?’

  ‘Oh, you mean right now? But I’m at home in Clontarf. It’ll take a while.’

  ‘Get driving so. Text me when you arrive.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just came to you?’

  ‘Text me from Starbucks.’

  My phone beeps.

  I’m here. What you like to drink?

  Mint tea.

  Okay, on it! xx

  Richie looks smiley and happy, delighted to see me. ‘Amy.’ He leans in for a kiss and goes for the mouth, something I’d half expected so I turn away in time. This surprises him, but not for long.

  ‘You look great,’ he declares. ‘Cute coat.’ He makes some signal to the lad behind the counter, who materializes with a pot of boiling water, for my mint tea.

  ‘Di
dn’t want your tea getting cold on you,’ Richie explains, with yet another smile. I hadn’t noticed this before but at some stage he’d obviously got veneers: his teeth are unnaturally square and even. Can teeth be described as smug?

  ‘I got you a muffin.’ He slides a plate across the table to me. ‘Cinnamon okay?’

  He pours my tea. ‘So what’s up? Couldn’t wait until Saturday week to see me?’ A flash of the smug veneers.

  ‘Richie, I’m really not going to that ball with you.’

  The expectant expression on his face doesn’t change. ‘You don’t like that sort of thing? I guess you do a lot of them in your job. Well, how about dinner? Anywhere you like! The Greenhouse? Guilbaud’s? Or we –’

  ‘Richie, I don’t want to go to anything with you.’

  ‘Why not? You’re on a break.’

  ‘Hugh’s on a break, but I’m not. And even if I was, I don’t have those sorts of feelings for you.’

  ‘You just need to try. C’mon, Amy, remember the way we were? I do.’

  There must be a name for this, the utter absence of empathy. It’s obviously some sort of personality disorder. Would it be narcissism? I must google the exact symptoms.

  ‘You deserve to have things made right,’ he says.

  ‘But it no longer matters.’

  ‘It does to me. I feel guilty. Amy, I’m … troubled. I wake up at night and I’m thinking about you and Neeve, and you were so young, the age Neeve is now, and on your own and I screwed you on the money and –’

  ‘I forgive you. You already know that.’

  ‘But the remorse won’t go away.’

  I shrug helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to suggest. Maybe you could walk the Camino.’

  ‘But it’s more than just guilt,’ he says. ‘I’m still attracted to you.’

  Oh, for the love of God.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I mean sexually.’

  How can I not laugh? Yes. I mean sexually. This will make a fabulous anecdote. Wait till I tell Hugh – oh, God, Hugh is gone. But other people. Derry. It already has the makings of a great catchphrase. Yes. I mean sexually.

  May I have that leg of lamb? Yes. I mean sexually.

  I LOVE your hair. Yes. I mean sexually.

  He must think my hoot of mirth is an expression of pleasure because he continues, earnestly, ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re in your forties. So am I. When I look at you, seventeen-year-old Amy is the Amy I see.’

  ‘Stop, Richie.’ He’s making a show of himself. I’m actually embarrassed for him.

  But could someone please tell me what’s going on? Is this some sort of cosmic consolation prize? The universe takes away one husband, a great one, and as a salve, re-gifts you the gobshite you’d loved twenty years ago?

  How strange that, once upon a time, a Richie pleading for forgiveness would have had me delirious with joy. Suddenly I wonder if Hugh and I will sit together like this one day on opposite sides of a table in a busy Starbucks, when we’re all done and dusted and consigned to The Past? The thought elicits a stab of unbearable grief.

  Where does love go when it dies? Into flowers and other beautiful things? Back out into the universe to be recycled? Because Richie was right: he and I had loved each other passionately and now nothing remains, except his self-indulgent, long-overdue guilt.

  ‘Trust me, Amy,’ Richie says. ‘We can go back to the way we were.’

  ‘We absolutely can’t.’

  ‘You’re not trying. Try. You have to because I can’t take feeling this way.’

  ‘Richie, maybe you should see a doctor. Get yourself checked out, it’d do no harm.’

  ‘You’re punishing me!’

  It’s not my intention. But I can’t give him what he wants, not now, it’s years too late, and with that I see that everything passes. Everything passes in the end, good and bad, love and pain. It’s a bittersweet truth to hold on to. Everything passes in the end. ‘Go into therapy,’ I suggest. ‘Or volunteer in a soup kitchen. One way or another, Richie, just learn to live with the guilt.’

  ‘Okay.’ Unexpectedly he’s all bluster. ‘If you won’t see me, I won’t see Neeve.’

  Now I’m scared. But only for half a second. Because just say I was mad enough to go along with his bullshit request, he’d tire of me super-fast and Neeve would be kicked to the kerb once more. ‘Seriously, Richie, threats? This is how you make things right? Maybe treating your daughter with kindness might help dampen down your guilt. Why don’t you take her to the poor blind children’s ball?’

  ‘I only wanted –’

  ‘Richie, you need to hear this. I don’t want to spend time with you. I don’t want to see you.’ I stand up. ‘I don’t want to hear from you unless it’s about Neeve.’

  ‘Ah, no, Amy –’

  The knife rattling on the plate, I slide the muffin back to him. ‘One last thing, I hate cinnamon. I’ve always hated cinnamon. Everyone knows.’

  Neeve is hovering by the front door. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Neeve.’ I swallow. ‘Let’s sit down.’

  She knows. I can see it in her. She knows what I’m going to say and already her tears are falling, my poor Neevey, who almost never cries.

  We sit knee to knee on the sofa, her hands in mine.

  ‘Neeve, I love Hugh,’ I speak softly, because I’m speaking to a little girl. ‘You’d like your daddy and me to be together, and that’s easy to understand. But it was a long time ago and I love somebody else now.’

  ‘But Hugh is so mean.’ The tears are gushing. ‘He’s gone away and left you, and Daddy is here and he’s sorry. He told me, Mum, how sorry he is, how he wishes he could change everything. He’ll fix it all, he told me. He’ll fix it for both of us, for the three of us.’

  ‘But I love Hugh.’

  She cries short, hard howls, as if they’re being stabbed out of her.

  It is excruciating.

  I let her cry because there is nothing – nothing – else I can do.

  58

  Saturday, 29 October, day forty-seven

  Saturday morning, it’s not even ten o’clock, and already I’ve ordered a satin skirt from Asos, done the weekly shop, made a frittata, read the papers and wondered if Steevie will ever talk to me again. There’s a lot to be said for insomnia.

  And here’s Kiara.

  ‘Morning,’ I say. ‘Will we put up the Hallowe’en stuff today?’

  ‘Is there any point doing Hallowe’en without Dad?’ She sounds mournful.

  Thanks to Hugh’s skill with electronics, we always have the best house on our road at Hallowe’en, maybe even the best house in the whole estate – thunder and lightning boom and flash in the garden while screechy cackles and hollow laughs ring out. Every single year since we moved here, he’s dressed up as an executioner to give out sweets. But even with his chainmail helmet and mask, all the kids know who he is. I love watching him doling out mini-Haribos to little ghostlings and tiny skeletons, all of them saying, ‘Thanks, Hugh, thanks, Hugh.’ And sometimes ‘Deadly costume, Hugh.’

  ‘There’s every point in us doing it!’ I say stoutly. ‘We’re still here, we count too!’

  ‘Mum,’ Kiara says, ‘I feel, you know, resentful of Dad. For going away. At the start I kinda admired it but now I’m, like, angry.’

  ‘Kiara.’ It’s good she’s told me, but the burden of saying the right words is onerous. ‘He loves you with every bit of his being. Going away like this, it wasn’t a – a … you know, a jaunt, a jolly. It was something he had no choice about.’

  ‘Do you believe that, Mum? And don’t lie just to make me feel better.’

  ‘Hand on heart, Kiara, I truly believe he had no choice. He hated having to hurt us but if he didn’t go, his mental health was really going to suffer. He was already on anti-depressants.’

  ‘He was? Oh, poor Dad.’

  ‘Granddad Robert dying did something to him that he couldn’t manage.’

  ‘So weird,’ she says. ‘I thoug
ht when you were Dad’s age that things like people dying didn’t upset you.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘Wow. So! We’ll Hallowe’en the house.’ Kiara never stays down for long. ‘I’ll wake Neeve and Sofie.’

  She thunders up the stairs and I hear Neeve grousing about being woken early on a Saturday morning for ‘some Hallowe’en bullshit’. But by the time I’ve arrived on the landing, she’s out of bed. For no reason at all she hugs me. Something has shifted since Thursday night: we’re suddenly closer.

  Sofie sticks her head out of her trapdoor. ‘Hallowe’en! Cool!’

  ‘Where’s the decorations?’ Kiara asks.

  ‘Up in the roof space.’ One of us will have to crawl in there to get the boxes. It’s usually Hugh. So now it’s me. I don’t even sigh.

  Neeve hands me the torch and I carefully climb the foldaway ladder that Hugh had installed. In the beam of torchlight the boxes are easy to spot: Hugh has drawn a skull and crossbones on them to distinguish them from the Christmas decorations, which are marked with green trees. Shite, there’s a spider, a black, thick-legged horror, sitting on the top box. I give it a hard glare and it scurries away.

  ‘Go, me,’ I say – quietly, though, because it’s not good to be talking to myself even if it’s simply a device to make me brave.

  The girls cluster at the foot of the ladder as I descend with the boxes. Then they start dragging stuff out. ‘Pumpkin lights! Gravestones! Cobwebs! This is sick!’

  ‘What’s this?’ Neeve pulls out a length of black fabric. ‘Oh! Hugh’s costume!’ She balls up the executioner outfit and lobs it in my direction.

  ‘Why am I getting it?’

  ‘You’ve to be both parents now,’ Neeve says. ‘G’wan! Put it on!’

  She’s joking – apart from anything else it would be swimming on me – and we all manage to laugh.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Kiara says. ‘Next year we’ll be back to normal.’

  But when they’ve hurried away to plant gravestones by the front door, I put the costume to my face and take a cautious sniff. It’s nearly a year since he’s worn it so it’s unlikely that any trace of him still lingers, but it does and a wave of memory makes me dizzy. The exact Hugh smell: it’s impossible to describe, warm, sweet, earthy, just him. The nostalgia, the terrible sense of loss, momentarily feels unbearable.